Please reread my post, I'm by no means arguing for complacency. In particular please reread the sentence about Bush and Obama.
Yes, it is better than using violence to solve an argument, but it's no less wrong and no less an example of weak individuals selling the public's liberties to the moneyed interests.
No. This is a wrong attitude. Having people use violence to take away personal property is substantially more wrong than using the court system to take away public liberty with public domain works. In this framework, the scale of what is being lost is smaller, and people *aren't dying* or being injure. Physical violence is almost always worse. One of the main ways civilization has advanced over time is the willingness to use dispute resolution systems that don't involve people killing each other. And that's not at all trivial. The analogy here might be to the old Asimov quote "when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Something similar is the case here.
Let me suggest a different, more optimistic narrative. Back in 2000 during the ongoing Bush-Gore legal fights, I was in a conversation with my brother and a mutual friend of ours whose family had emigrated from Venezuela. My brother expressed that he was appalled at what was happening and how it was making an absolute laughingstock out of the US. Our friend disagreed and said (slight paraphrase): "You don't understand. In much of the world, this would be solved by fighting in the streets until one's sides army faction gained ascendancy. This is being resolved with paperwork not bullets. This is the height of civilized behavior."
The situation here is similar. A 6-2 legal decision that allows in some limited circumstances some works in the public domain is pretty good behavior. The comparison to make is having members of the government come around at gunpoint and take property they want to give to their friends. We can disagree with a court case, but the fact that these sorts of things are decided by the courts shows how far we've come. This is by no means perfect, and what Bush and Obama have done with Guantanamo and other issues shows that we need to remain vigilant and constantly fight against the slide into violence and tyranny. But that doesn't mean either that we should lose perspective about where our society stands.
Unfortunately, a combination of desperation and ignorance does make thieves sometimes go after radioactive materials without realizing. And sometimes people die. The most severe such incident occurred in Goainia in Brazil in 1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident. Multiple bystanders were hurt. Four people ended up dying, and many more developed radiation sickness and had long-term health problems as a result. Plutonium would be a particularly bad choice in this context even if it were cheap because it looks just like a regular metal in most conditions. (And yes, I know your comment isn't really serious.)
Yeah, I don't disagree with that substantially. The notion of science becoming progressively less wrong is essentially correct. What I mean by wrong in the sense is that scientific ideas are rarely overthrown wholesale. So when SR replaced Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian mechanics still worked as a very good approximation for the vast majority of cases. Actual total overthrow of an idea is extremely rare.
20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe
Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars
No one who knew anything at all seriously claimed this. What was claimed was that we didn't have the technology to detect planets around other stars and that we weren't likely to have it for a while. The second part turned out to be wrong, but that's a much milder claim.
Occasionally science is wrong, but the vast majority of the time it isn't.
Because it isn't. They've done some very careful estimating here. This works off a combination of modelig and empirical data. We know how many stars Kepler has looked at and what approximate fraction of the total set of stars in the galaxy that represents. For those stars, we have a pretty good idea of lower bounds of how many planets they have, and we know what sorts of planets are the sort that Kepler would have trouble detecting. We can look at that distribution and use it to get a rough estimate. No one is claiming that this number is precise. But the true number is likely not more than an order of magnitude or two off. This isn't an asspull. This is scientists working very carefully very difficult stuff on the cutting edge and doing their best with hard work and rigorous thinking to produce an estimate. This is what real science looks like.
Yes. Suppose that there were a puzzle with 16 numbers that is not unique. Then removing a number gives a 15 item puzzle that isn't unique since all the solutions to the 16 puzzle will work for it. Similar remarks apply to removing 2 or 3 numbers all the way down.
So you want to kill some random person because of his nationality if his nation does something bad? Do you think that killing of Iraqi civilians justifies the killing of American civilians? Retribution may feel good. But it accomplishes very little. At the end of the day, when you kill someone you are killing someone's son or daughter. You are killing someone' mother or father. You are killing a fellow human being.
This guy is in prison in Iran. This would not be the first time that a regime has coerced people to say things that aren't true and to sign false confessions. The US has in the last decade done it also. In the US, even when there is no torture, false confessions can be extracted even in murder cases- http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this sort of program really did exist, but the fact that someone in Iranian custody confessed to it isn't good evidence for the claim.
This doesn't follow. The question here isn't the general question of solving a generalized Sudoku grid (which is NP complete) but rather the problem of the minimum size needed for a unique solution. This isn't the same problem. It could very well be that there's an easy answer to this question and that the numbers follow some easy pattern (like say 2n-1 for n symbols).
Er, I made a mistake here. One just needs to check this for 16 clues, so 81 choose 16, and 9^16 are the numbers one cases about, so one gets around 10^30. The other important thing to note is that this is the set of possible clue arrangements. Not all of these lead to valid sudokus at all. There are only around 10^21 of those.
This isn't a proof that really gives us any understanding of the problem. They used various symmetries of the problem to reduce how many cases they'd need to check and then checked it for all cases using a lot computing power (without reducing the cases there are around 10^33 separate cases to check (since 81 choose 17 is around 10^17 and 9^17 is around 10^16).So they did due some good work in reducing the case set, but they still had a lot left over. A result of this brute force approach this means that there's no obvious way to generalize this proof to get the minimum number needed when one has n^2 symbols in general. Proofs really should give us insight into why statements are true, and this one really doesn't. That's not to knock on the accomplishment: this clearly took a lot of effort, some very smart work, and some clever use of group theory and very skilled programming.
Most plants have pesticides built into their genes. Almost every single crop has naturally occurring pesticides. Worst, as humans over time have bred for hardier crop, we've often been increasing the production level of pesticides without realizing it. In that regard, GM crops with pesticides are great- we know exactly what pesticides there are and in what levels. Note also that there's a heavy preference for pesticides produced by plants as opposed to ones sprayed on since when you spray a) much of it is wasted and b) in practice one requires a lot more pesticides than just letting the plants do it. For these purposes the GMOs are essentially functioning like very carefully bred plants. There are other problems with GMOs (TFA discusses one of them) and the problem of how many of the GMO crops are sterile are obviously severe but building pesticides into genes is not a serious worry in this context.
GoDaddy controls around 45 million domains. So this is about 1/2000 of all their domains. Not that much by that metric. But what probably caused a notice is that this is a much larger variance than what normally occurs on any given day. And some of these domains were domains which were using affiliated services.
That's not quite accurate. We have demonstrated controlled magnetic confinement fusion before. What ITER will hopefully do is get more usable energy out than we put in.
The F22 program has cost around 66 billion dollars. That's about equivalent to a mission to Mars and two copies of the Superconducting Supercollider. That's equivalent to about 130 rovers of the same type as Opportunity and Spirit (ignoring the economies of scale that would substantially reduce the cost of having a lot of them). Etc. Etc. Instead we get unworking jet fighters that are supposed to be better than our previous jet fighters which are already estimated to be better than any other anyone else has in the world. Great priorities.
Kuhn, philosopher of science and author of the influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, believed that revolution in science was forged only by younger scientists.
That's not what he said. Kuhn's views were subtle and complicated. He argued that revolutions in science occur for a variety of reasons, and that scientists switch from paradigm to paradigm and that one cause of switches is older scientists who are set in their ways retiring or dying. This is only one aspect of Kuhn's model. He didn't claim that revolutions were started by younger scientists. If one hasn't read the book I strongly recommend that people do so. Kuhn is an excellent writer. He's wrong on a lot of issues, but is generally wrong for interesting reasons. Of course, it doesn't help matters that we have people repeatedly giving inaccurate summaries of what he argued for.
Yes, there's no question this was a worst case scenario. Although not all versions of the scenario involved the Soviets shooting down all the satellites. One point that was made was that a small satellite would be harder to shoot down, so the shuttle could be used to launch a single satellite in a specific orbit and then land back before the Soviets could respond. All of the scenarios where they wanted these ridiculous polar orbits were situations that were one step away from Doomsday. But you are correct that they were as a whole pretty ridiculous. It does make one wonder what the still classified orbit profiles were and whether this was designed to any extent as a cover for them. But the military desire for single polar orbit and return capability is well documented.
Everything you've said is completely correct. But I'd like to point out an additional, often underappreciated problem with the shuttle. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down. This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified. So we should add to the list:
4) You don't use a single vehicle that you try to design to do every possible orbit on the off chance that it might be useful.
Moral systems should be able to deal with hypotheticals. But I find it interesting that in this post you assert apparently that the line you are distinguishing is in fact between the life of a chimpanzee v. the life of a person. I don't think anyone here is arguing otherwise. Would you be say in favor of testing cosmetics on chimpanzees? It will make the chimpanzees lives miserable and may end up killing a few but won't have any chance of saving humans. Similar questions apply to testing medicines on the chimpanzees where the medicines are for essentially non-fatal illnesses. If you object to this then you are assigning moral weight to the chimpanzees. Then the only issue is a matter of how much weight to assign.
So you don't actually mean "logically coherent" but mean an ethical theory that makes you happy. Frankly, your ethical system seems pretty incoherent or inconsistently applied. If you are a Kantian do you have zero concern about what happens if every intelligent species assigns zero ethical weight to the others? Categorical imperative would at minimum say one should have ethical concern for intelligent aliens.
I don't care how similar to people they are, they're not people. A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people.
So if there were a neanderthal today would it be ethically relevant? If intelligent aliens showed up would you have no ethical problem hurting them? And if these are ok,how do you feel about experimenting on mentally retarded humans? Why, if at all, are any of these different?
There are ethical systems that can make the sort of distinctions that you think are't possible. For example, a utilitarian will consider the degree of suffering to any living thing and then consider how much benefit comes from the research. If the benefit exceeds the suffering that results the utilitarian will be in favor of it. Some versions of utilitarianism give more weight to more intelligent entities. In those forms, chimps are pretty smart so causing them suffering is bad. So your claim that there are no normative systems which can make this sort of distinction is false.
Wow. Your first link is to an error that was literally caught within hours of it happening and didn't impact the final total. The other issues point to general incompetency and in some limited, local cases, actual fraud. That's really in the same category as nearly nation-wide fraud that looks centralized. And let's say for a hypothetical that the US election fraud problems were nearly as severe as the Russian ones or as severe. Guess what? That doesn't magically make them ok. That one country has problems doesn't make it ok when similar problems occur elsewhere.
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Yes, it is better than using violence to solve an argument, but it's no less wrong and no less an example of weak individuals selling the public's liberties to the moneyed interests.
No. This is a wrong attitude. Having people use violence to take away personal property is substantially more wrong than using the court system to take away public liberty with public domain works. In this framework, the scale of what is being lost is smaller, and people *aren't dying* or being injure. Physical violence is almost always worse. One of the main ways civilization has advanced over time is the willingness to use dispute resolution systems that don't involve people killing each other. And that's not at all trivial. The analogy here might be to the old Asimov quote "when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." Something similar is the case here.
Let me suggest a different, more optimistic narrative. Back in 2000 during the ongoing Bush-Gore legal fights, I was in a conversation with my brother and a mutual friend of ours whose family had emigrated from Venezuela. My brother expressed that he was appalled at what was happening and how it was making an absolute laughingstock out of the US. Our friend disagreed and said (slight paraphrase): "You don't understand. In much of the world, this would be solved by fighting in the streets until one's sides army faction gained ascendancy. This is being resolved with paperwork not bullets. This is the height of civilized behavior."
The situation here is similar. A 6-2 legal decision that allows in some limited circumstances some works in the public domain is pretty good behavior. The comparison to make is having members of the government come around at gunpoint and take property they want to give to their friends. We can disagree with a court case, but the fact that these sorts of things are decided by the courts shows how far we've come. This is by no means perfect, and what Bush and Obama have done with Guantanamo and other issues shows that we need to remain vigilant and constantly fight against the slide into violence and tyranny. But that doesn't mean either that we should lose perspective about where our society stands.
Unfortunately, a combination of desperation and ignorance does make thieves sometimes go after radioactive materials without realizing. And sometimes people die. The most severe such incident occurred in Goainia in Brazil in 1987 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident. Multiple bystanders were hurt. Four people ended up dying, and many more developed radiation sickness and had long-term health problems as a result. Plutonium would be a particularly bad choice in this context even if it were cheap because it looks just like a regular metal in most conditions. (And yes, I know your comment isn't really serious.)
Yeah, I don't disagree with that substantially. The notion of science becoming progressively less wrong is essentially correct. What I mean by wrong in the sense is that scientific ideas are rarely overthrown wholesale. So when SR replaced Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian mechanics still worked as a very good approximation for the vast majority of cases. Actual total overthrow of an idea is extremely rare.
20 years ago... "We" are the only system of planets in the universe Last week... The number of planets in the universe outnumbers the number of stars
No one who knew anything at all seriously claimed this. What was claimed was that we didn't have the technology to detect planets around other stars and that we weren't likely to have it for a while. The second part turned out to be wrong, but that's a much milder claim.
Occasionally science is wrong, but the vast majority of the time it isn't.
Because it isn't. They've done some very careful estimating here. This works off a combination of modelig and empirical data. We know how many stars Kepler has looked at and what approximate fraction of the total set of stars in the galaxy that represents. For those stars, we have a pretty good idea of lower bounds of how many planets they have, and we know what sorts of planets are the sort that Kepler would have trouble detecting. We can look at that distribution and use it to get a rough estimate. No one is claiming that this number is precise. But the true number is likely not more than an order of magnitude or two off. This isn't an asspull. This is scientists working very carefully very difficult stuff on the cutting edge and doing their best with hard work and rigorous thinking to produce an estimate. This is what real science looks like.
Yes. Suppose that there were a puzzle with 16 numbers that is not unique. Then removing a number gives a 15 item puzzle that isn't unique since all the solutions to the 16 puzzle will work for it. Similar remarks apply to removing 2 or 3 numbers all the way down.
So you want to kill some random person because of his nationality if his nation does something bad? Do you think that killing of Iraqi civilians justifies the killing of American civilians? Retribution may feel good. But it accomplishes very little. At the end of the day, when you kill someone you are killing someone's son or daughter. You are killing someone' mother or father. You are killing a fellow human being.
This guy is in prison in Iran. This would not be the first time that a regime has coerced people to say things that aren't true and to sign false confessions. The US has in the last decade done it also. In the US, even when there is no torture, false confessions can be extracted even in murder cases- http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this sort of program really did exist, but the fact that someone in Iranian custody confessed to it isn't good evidence for the claim.
This doesn't follow. The question here isn't the general question of solving a generalized Sudoku grid (which is NP complete) but rather the problem of the minimum size needed for a unique solution. This isn't the same problem. It could very well be that there's an easy answer to this question and that the numbers follow some easy pattern (like say 2n-1 for n symbols).
Er, I made a mistake here. One just needs to check this for 16 clues, so 81 choose 16, and 9^16 are the numbers one cases about, so one gets around 10^30. The other important thing to note is that this is the set of possible clue arrangements. Not all of these lead to valid sudokus at all. There are only around 10^21 of those.
This isn't a proof that really gives us any understanding of the problem. They used various symmetries of the problem to reduce how many cases they'd need to check and then checked it for all cases using a lot computing power (without reducing the cases there are around 10^33 separate cases to check (since 81 choose 17 is around 10^17 and 9^17 is around 10^16) .So they did due some good work in reducing the case set, but they still had a lot left over. A result of this brute force approach this means that there's no obvious way to generalize this proof to get the minimum number needed when one has n^2 symbols in general. Proofs really should give us insight into why statements are true, and this one really doesn't. That's not to knock on the accomplishment: this clearly took a lot of effort, some very smart work, and some clever use of group theory and very skilled programming.
Most plants have pesticides built into their genes. Almost every single crop has naturally occurring pesticides. Worst, as humans over time have bred for hardier crop, we've often been increasing the production level of pesticides without realizing it. In that regard, GM crops with pesticides are great- we know exactly what pesticides there are and in what levels. Note also that there's a heavy preference for pesticides produced by plants as opposed to ones sprayed on since when you spray a) much of it is wasted and b) in practice one requires a lot more pesticides than just letting the plants do it. For these purposes the GMOs are essentially functioning like very carefully bred plants. There are other problems with GMOs (TFA discusses one of them) and the problem of how many of the GMO crops are sterile are obviously severe but building pesticides into genes is not a serious worry in this context.
GoDaddy controls around 45 million domains. So this is about 1/2000 of all their domains. Not that much by that metric. But what probably caused a notice is that this is a much larger variance than what normally occurs on any given day. And some of these domains were domains which were using affiliated services.
That's not quite accurate. We have demonstrated controlled magnetic confinement fusion before. What ITER will hopefully do is get more usable energy out than we put in.
The F22 program has cost around 66 billion dollars. That's about equivalent to a mission to Mars and two copies of the Superconducting Supercollider. That's equivalent to about 130 rovers of the same type as Opportunity and Spirit (ignoring the economies of scale that would substantially reduce the cost of having a lot of them). Etc. Etc. Instead we get unworking jet fighters that are supposed to be better than our previous jet fighters which are already estimated to be better than any other anyone else has in the world. Great priorities.
Kuhn, philosopher of science and author of the influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, believed that revolution in science was forged only by younger scientists.
That's not what he said. Kuhn's views were subtle and complicated. He argued that revolutions in science occur for a variety of reasons, and that scientists switch from paradigm to paradigm and that one cause of switches is older scientists who are set in their ways retiring or dying. This is only one aspect of Kuhn's model. He didn't claim that revolutions were started by younger scientists. If one hasn't read the book I strongly recommend that people do so. Kuhn is an excellent writer. He's wrong on a lot of issues, but is generally wrong for interesting reasons. Of course, it doesn't help matters that we have people repeatedly giving inaccurate summaries of what he argued for.
Ah, and that's an option that only has a chance of working if it is kept classified. That seems plausible.
Yes, there's no question this was a worst case scenario. Although not all versions of the scenario involved the Soviets shooting down all the satellites. One point that was made was that a small satellite would be harder to shoot down, so the shuttle could be used to launch a single satellite in a specific orbit and then land back before the Soviets could respond. All of the scenarios where they wanted these ridiculous polar orbits were situations that were one step away from Doomsday. But you are correct that they were as a whole pretty ridiculous. It does make one wonder what the still classified orbit profiles were and whether this was designed to any extent as a cover for them. But the military desire for single polar orbit and return capability is well documented.
Everything you've said is completely correct. But I'd like to point out an additional, often underappreciated problem with the shuttle. The US military insisted that the shuttle be able to take off from a variety of other locations including Vandenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandenberg_AFB_Space_Launch_Complex_6. They wanted it to be able to launch into a near polar orbit, send out a satellite and land all in a single orbit of the Earth. This was so that if things ever got hot with the USSR we could launch additional spy satellites faster than the Soviets could shoot them down. This article http://www.space.com/1438-chapter-opens-space-shuttle-born-compromise.html discusses this in detail. There are also other requirements that the military had but it seems that the details remain classified. So we should add to the list:
4) You don't use a single vehicle that you try to design to do every possible orbit on the off chance that it might be useful.
Moral systems should be able to deal with hypotheticals. But I find it interesting that in this post you assert apparently that the line you are distinguishing is in fact between the life of a chimpanzee v. the life of a person. I don't think anyone here is arguing otherwise. Would you be say in favor of testing cosmetics on chimpanzees? It will make the chimpanzees lives miserable and may end up killing a few but won't have any chance of saving humans. Similar questions apply to testing medicines on the chimpanzees where the medicines are for essentially non-fatal illnesses. If you object to this then you are assigning moral weight to the chimpanzees. Then the only issue is a matter of how much weight to assign.
So you don't actually mean "logically coherent" but mean an ethical theory that makes you happy. Frankly, your ethical system seems pretty incoherent or inconsistently applied. If you are a Kantian do you have zero concern about what happens if every intelligent species assigns zero ethical weight to the others? Categorical imperative would at minimum say one should have ethical concern for intelligent aliens.
So you think. Someone else (indeed a lot of people 150 years ago) would have disagreed with you.
I don't care how similar to people they are, they're not people. A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people.
So if there were a neanderthal today would it be ethically relevant? If intelligent aliens showed up would you have no ethical problem hurting them? And if these are ok,how do you feel about experimenting on mentally retarded humans? Why, if at all, are any of these different?
There are ethical systems that can make the sort of distinctions that you think are't possible. For example, a utilitarian will consider the degree of suffering to any living thing and then consider how much benefit comes from the research. If the benefit exceeds the suffering that results the utilitarian will be in favor of it. Some versions of utilitarianism give more weight to more intelligent entities. In those forms, chimps are pretty smart so causing them suffering is bad. So your claim that there are no normative systems which can make this sort of distinction is false.
Wow. Your first link is to an error that was literally caught within hours of it happening and didn't impact the final total. The other issues point to general incompetency and in some limited, local cases, actual fraud. That's really in the same category as nearly nation-wide fraud that looks centralized. And let's say for a hypothetical that the US election fraud problems were nearly as severe as the Russian ones or as severe. Guess what? That doesn't magically make them ok. That one country has problems doesn't make it ok when similar problems occur elsewhere.